Www.zicora.com Zimbabwe Community Radio
Posted By Own Staff
Tuesday 11 May 2010
THE Ministry of Education, Sports, Arts and Culture is working on a programme to assist children who are not able to pay their examination fees for Ordinary and Advanced level, a Cabinet Minister has revealed.
Minister David Coltart said his ministry was working on a programme to cater for students who were not able to pay their examination fees.
“We are currently discussing with the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare to come up with a programme that will cater for children who cannot pay their examinations fees. The programme will cater for those sitting for O and A level examinations,†he said.
The new programme comes after the Minister of Higher Education, Stan Mudenge, revealed that about 90 000 Zimbabwean students failed to sit for their A’ level examinations last year due to high examination fees.
Minister Coltart said the other option was to extend the Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) to cover those who could not pay ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examination fees.
“The alternative which we are considering is the extension of the BEAM programme to cover those students who are not able to pay for their ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examination fees,†he said.
Last year, more than 100 schools from Masvingo province recorded a zero percent pass rate in the ‘A’ level examinations.
Recently, Minister Coltart said Zimbabwe had recorded the worst ‘O’ level results since independence in 1980 with a pass rate of 19 percent.
The United Nations Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF) recently launched a US$70 million Educational Transition Fund (ETF) to ensure access and quality education for the country’s children under the BEAM programme, which is meant to assist  vulnerable children with payment of levies, tuition and examination fees.
At least 700 000 children will benefit from BEAM.
The fund – supported by Australia , Denmark , Germany , the Netherlands , New Zealand , Norway , Sweden , United Kingdom and the European Commission -will be used to buy critical textbooks and learning materials.